Setting Goals in Your Homeschool

It’s almost the start of a new year! While the school year is in full swing, January can still be a good month to evaluate your homeschool year and consider making adjustments.

If you need a little homeschooling inspiration, setting goals is a great way to get a homeschool year back on track. But – how can you set goals for your kids? What should you do if your children have trouble reaching their learning goals? Here are a couple of tips to help you set goals in your homeschool.

Consider your children.

When we’re setting goals for our kids, we have to consider their abilities. If you have a child (or children) with special conditions, you may have to set different goals for each one. For example, we have several children with ADHD, so their learning goals have a few built-in considerations based on their specific abilities.

One of our biggest learning goals for our youngest boy was to simply complete a worksheet in one sitting. Since he’s so hyperactive, this was a real challenge and it took a while to help him reach it. When he did, though, we were thrilled!

For our daughter, though, we set a goal of completing her assignment thoroughly without making careless mistakes. Every time she did that successfully, we made sure to offer praise and encouragement so that she’d keep going.

Be flexible.

No matter what goals you decide to set, be sure to build in a bit of flexibility. One of the things that makes goal setting work is the feeling of accomplishment you get when you reach one. If your child’s goals are too hard to reach, he or she might give up altogether, which is the opposite of what we want.

If you set a goal and it appears that your child is struggling to reach it, you might decide to adjust it to make it a little easier. For example, if you’re working on reading with your child and your goal is for him to read 30 minutes a day, you might want to reduce it to 15 or 20 minutes initially. As your kids progress, you can always bump the goals back up.

Do you use goals in your homeschool? How do you go about setting them? Let us know in the comments!

Share the love!

Author information...

Selena is a homeschooling graduate, a writer, and a mama to four super special kids. She's also living with ADHD, as are her husband and three of her children. Selena blogs about her family's learning adventures every week at Look! We're Learning! You can follow Selena on Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, Google Plus, Twitter, and YouTube.